Archive for April, 2007

Master Bedroom Painted

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

Today, I finished the last of the master bedroom painting. The room was completed last Sunday and I moved in Monday night with the gracious help of Jessica. The closests remained lacking one more coat of paint till Friday and Sunday. It is so much better than I could have imagined. My color selection was awesome. I just stare at the walls. lol.

The quality of the closets is just abysmal. It would take a week or more to fix and I just don’t want to take away from other newer, funner projects. Oh well, it’s just the closets. You have to start learning somewhere.

My bed is quite tall and that got in the way of the TV. We dropped it to the floor and now it’s too short. I plan on getting a few well cut 2×4 studs to raised it up to exactly the right height. I didn’t know there was one till this debacle. Or perhaps I was simply used to accepting things as given like in the apartments. There’s not a lot of modification possible. Hang a few pictures and place your furniture.

Posted in House, Projects | No Comments »

Planting Day

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

Today, I planted all the seeds, tubers, and seedlings I had been holding. The volunteer sunflower has become the edge of an L-shaped bed around one of the tree stumps. It’s a seed bed containing red corn, beans, sunflowers, alyssium, marjoram, wheatgrass, radishes, bachelor buttons, parsley, nasturium, marigolds, cucumbers, and the rest of the purple potatoes. The low vines will help to smother weeds around the tall corn and sunflowers.

The variety, amount, and types of seeds will help to create a “natural” bed of beneficial and complementary plants. Some won’t make it for whatever reason. Soil is too heavy, competition is too heavy, too much sun, sun blocked out, can’t compete with the weeds or grass, whatever. I can watch and see what to plant next year.

One thing I’m curious about was the Native American planting techniques using squash, corn, and beans. Squash stays low and covers grass and weeds. Beans in rich the soil for the heavy feeding corn and provide a support to climb on. Corn grows tall and straight for the beans. There’s probably a whole lot more to this arrangement. Kind of like says gas for you car comes from oil wells. It does, but you don’t fill your car with crude oil. There’s more to it.

Alyssium in most of the yard. 2 lbs of lawn repair.

Gladiolas, pumpkin, cantalope, watermelon, nasturium, marigolds, elephant ears, and petunias are throughout the yard.

In case the hops don’t produce I planted a few Morning Glories under the pergola trellis.

Pumpkins went in one corner with the fruit trees and a huge portion of the dog pooh. Two hills of cantalope are under the “dead” pecan tree. Looks like dead really means “extremely late budding”. Near them two hills of red watermelons.

Another three El Camino loads of dirt topped off the large garden bed. Walmart’s idea of “Top Soil” is funny. The same with “Composted” in the composted cow manure. Expensive potting soil from Lowe’s topped of the last 2-4 inches. This bed wasn’t mixed as well as the smaller one and has streaks of amendments and types of soil. It’s is a whole lot of work to mix dirt like you would a cake mix. My original intention was to order a truckload of mixed (compost, perlite, top soil, etc.) soil. You know like you see on those gardening shows. However, I couldn’t find that. So, one frackin’ bag at a time. There’s probably 250+ bags of dirt in the two beds.

The reason I worked so hard on these was to avoid the difficulties I had with gardening as a kid. We never had a good garden and apples depended on the frost date and worms. It got to be too hot or something ate everything. I don’t know what happened. That’s a lot of it. I was too young to know anything different than what mom did. No internet, books, or other people. So, this is my attempt to scratch that itch. My resources are far greater know than then. I’ll through any amount of money, thought, and significant time at it to “fix” this memory.

I planted the harvestable purple potatoes in the large bed. The others in the seed bed will make potatoes in super hard clay. Too hard to harvest. The raised beds are super soft right now. I seeded a packet of lettuce. Planted the pole beens and bush beans. Marigold transplants went in the edges. And a petunia between the potatoes. The large bed will be beans and potatoes. The smaller will be tomatoes and herbs. Of course both beds will have copious amounts of herbs and flowers. Near harvest time everything should be bulge or overflowing with leaves, blooms, and vegetables.

This soil is something else. The hardest, clayest, gummiest stuff I ever seen. This house is 40 yr old and the yard has been tended some of that time. There’s quite a bit of organic material in it. Lots and lots of earth worms every single place I dig. Yet, when it dries the ground cracks and without my 190 lb body jumping on the shovel I wouldn’t be able to get it in the ground. And there are many rose bushes along 2 sides and they are thriving. The “require” acidic soil there’s no way these guys are getting that here. Really, nothing has a problem growing. New things come up all the time. I’ve pulled up more oak tree volunteers than elms. Come to think of it. The elms seeds don’t seem to be sprouting. I’m amazed. Oh yeah, today I found the first pecan tree volunteer. I’m not really a fan, but I planted him in a pot. Maybe someone will want a pecan tree known to grown in clay. It’s wierd to see that nut that I’ve eaten so many times with green sprig coming out of it.

Well, enough for now.

Posted in House, Projects | No Comments »

Companion Planting Links

Friday, April 27th, 2007

With one raised be complete, the simply lacking soil, and the risk of a freeze fading, it’s time to start planting. Looks like I’m going to cram as much into the raised beds as possible. Lots of herbs and companion plants.

Some things I noted while watching the yard green up is the number of plants perennials that are bug resistant; garlic, onion, and mint. There’s also some sweet peas, wild roses invading from the neighbor yard, a plum tree (thought it was a bush), 3 lilac bushes, and 3-4 things that are unidentified. One plant, Grandma says is Larkspur, seems to be invading everything everywhere. If I didn’t know better I would think it was a weed. The mint is fantastic, green leaf with purple stems, and trying unsuccessfully to choke out the rose bushes. Turns out this is one of the beneficial plant combinations, since nothing likes to eat mint and the flowers attract bug predators.

Not everything will fit in the beds; corn, pumpkin, cantalope, watermelon, peas, and beans. It will be fun to watch it come together. It’s hard to imagine sizes right now. The grass, dandelions, and lambs quarter look to be taking over, but the vines will take care of that. Mom’s pumpkin filled yard last summer didn’t need any weeding. Leaves the size of platters blocked out everything. Of course, the bugs were a problem. :)

Anyway here are some links that looked interesting.

Companion Planting
Down Garden Services
Mini Farm Homestead
Wikipedia – Companion Planting
Inspired by Nature’s…

Posted in House, Projects | No Comments »

Pergola

Friday, April 27th, 2007

Last weekend and this whole week I’ve been under the weather. Some sort of sinus yuck. That slowed things down quite a bit. The master bedroom painting and 1 closet were finished and I got to sleep in my own bed. Sleeping on the air mattress lasted 20 days and it didn’t help being sick.

Tommorrow, I plan on starting the Pergola in front of the back porch. It will be cedar about 18 X 12 with North/South beams. Six posts in a slightly unusual pattern. It’s hard to describe w/o a picture. On one end are 2 hops planted with their own trellises. If the temp will stay above 40 these guys should cover the trellis in 4-6 weeks and be ready for more. To this I’ll add some Morning Glorys just in case the hops have problems like last year. Petunias and marigolds have already started going in the dirt for ground cover, beauty, and bugs resistance.

Under the Pergola will be stone with some significant spaces for 1-2″ plants. A mint from last year’s research into steppable plants survived the very tough winter. He can go in mid-high traffic areas. Another survivor was a little rosette and stem sedum called Dragon’s Blood? This will go in low traffic areas like borders. Around the posts large plants like dianthus can be planted for some height.

I already started removing the existing river stone (on one end) and placed cinderblock pavers (on the other end). It looks like they just put down the pavers which explains why they are slightly too tall, creating a drainage issue in our recent flooding rains. I’m scraping off another .5 – 1 inch of soil. This is happening now, because the construction of the pergola above will require a lot of walking and thus tamp down the soil before sand and rock come in.

So, tomorrow the posts and roof supports.

Posted in House, Projects | No Comments »

Faucets Selected

Friday, April 27th, 2007

I wanted the faucets in the house to match and some need work anyway. The guest bath tub faucets leak and are originals. The master bath will get replaced. The kitchen faucets look new, but they are too long and hit the sprayer.

The goal here is easy to clean, simple, and smooth. No edges, no crevices for dirt; flowing. A few weeks ago I picked up the guest tub faucets. I think they’ll do for the whole house. Though the bathroom faucets look a little weird.

It is the American Standard Colony Soft collection model number XX75.
Bathroom single handle 2175
Bathroom 2 handle 2275
Tub 3 handle 3275.500
Tub 2 handle 3275.300
Kitchen 2475 or 4275



Posted in House, Projects | No Comments »

Origins of VBA

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Joel on Software has a great blog on the origins of Visual Basic for Applications and the fact that it is being dropped from the Mac versions of Office. Microsoft has slowly been dropping their Mac versions for the past 2 yrs or so.

Joel on Software

Posted in Computers, Programming, Technology | No Comments »

Kryptonite Discovered in Serbian Mine

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

Researchers from mining group Rio Tinto discovered the unusual mineral and enlisted the help of Dr Stanley when they could not match it with anything known previously to science.

Once the London expert had unravelled the mineral’s chemical make-up, he was shocked to discover this formula was already referenced in literature – albeit fictional literature.

“The new mineral does not contain fluorine (which it does in the film) and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite.”

BBC News

Posted in Rambling | No Comments »

Why would the NSA need to record all Internet traffic?

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

When I first started learning about the internet, network protocols, etc. from the guys at my first job I ask these question.

What’s the difference between 40 bit(France doesn’t allow any encryption over 40 bit) and 128 bit encryption? The amount of time it takes to crack it. 40 bit doesn’t take long. 128 bit takes a while.

So, if someone wanted to reconstruct the encrypted transmission between two computers on the Internet they only have to crack a 128 bit? No, each packet has to be cracked separately and that would take too much time. A packet only holds a tiny part of data.

In essence the little locks IE displays on bank pages, Amazon.com, Walmart.com, etc. rely on the fact that no one has the time it takes to crack the entire transmission. Even if you cracked it you would have to record it all and crack it later since nothing is fast enough to crack it as you go.

That brings up another issue of network routing. The little packets don’t go in order and don’t take the same route each time. This is why VOIP phones, video conferencing, and streaming web stuff suck. All those demand sequential delivery. A too late packet is worthless. You would need to record all or most of them to make sense of the communication.

I submit that the NSA seeks to record all the internet traffic in order to crack these encrypted messages and that they have 1 found faster ways of cracking 128 bit than is commonly known. This is based on testimony that members have come up with encryption technology years before non-members made it available to the public. And 2 that they have resources large enough to crack 128 bit in a reasonable amount of time. Days and not months or years as would generally be supposed. This is based on the number of massive multicomputer systems in the public domain used for genetic research and computer science research and the size of the government budget.

The information about traffic analysis if probably true, but is not the only reason for recording web traffic. The traffic analysis would give you a high level view. Then it would be nice to zoom in on specific transmissions and crack them to verify suppositions about the analysis or learn the contents of the message.

How would Americans feel if it was known the government was recording everything and could know the contents of every single message, encrypted or not? This would seem like the definition of a police state in which the populace is ignorant of the policing activity. How could this information be used? It’s frightening to think what would happen given certain intentions.

Posted in Rambling, Technology | No Comments »

COM/.Net Interop Solutions

Friday, April 20th, 2007

A quick update on the COM/Interop problems I’ve been writing about the past few months. As I mentioned in the extremely long post on 4/7, we came much closer to solving the problem than before. Previous solutions had been to account for all the COM objects and release all of them when the application close. However, this did not fix the problem only alleviate it.

In writing the next version and with the freedom associated with change a new version and not a patch, I decided to make one COM object that the whole web session would used. We were making an object next to the code that would use it, then releasing it when finished. The idea being if the make and release seemed error prone than reduce the number of times that happens.

The same call that takes the root level COM object from ASP creates the FieldManager. And the same call that closes the root level COM object destroys FieldManager. Then all references to the COM FieldManager get replaced with the .Net FieldManager. Suddenly, there’s one more layer between the working .Net code and the COM code.

Some cleanup was done after this; inheritance from a base object and replacing some COM FieldManager methods with a .Net version. Turns out one of the most heavily used aspects of FieldManager is to ask for more information about a field. And some of this information is hardcoded in a c++ object in the COM source code. A c# program was written to “translate” the relevant lines of the c++ code into equivalent c# code. There are about 1400 fields stored this way and changes from one version of the COM object to the next may go unnoticed byt the .Net team. So an automated solution was much prefered. Now, instead of a COM call for this information and .Net call for this information is used. If the information is not held in .Net then a COM call is made. For our most standard test file, all calls for field information were handled by the “translated” .Net code.

The last set of changes concerning the FieldManager field info are untested, but the other changes have already passed through QA into production and there seems to be no side affects. Hopefully, this addresses the problem and the solutions above turn out to be the correct way to handle COM/.Net interop.

P.S.
In making the import c++ code I discovered something interesting. Some lines in the c++ code imported as strings did not readily convert into integers in .Net. Maybe they were blank or an enum. The first method I tried was to use a try/catch. “try{ Int32.Parse()}catch{//you must be an enum}”. This personaly annoys the shit out of me. I should be able to evaluate a string that very likely is a string and maybe is an integer and decide what to do instead of waiting for it to fail a try/catch. VB.Net has IsNumeric() to do this. c# has nothing (thanks MS). So I referenced Microsoft.VisualBasic and then used “if (Microsoft.VisualBasic.Information.IsNumeric()){Int32.Parse}else{ //you must be an enum}”.

I was stunned by the performance difference. The results were the same, but the first solution using try/catch took over a minute to run. The second solution take ~15 seconds. This is huge. Cheers.

Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Update of SQL Server Database Publishing Toolkit for Web Hosting

Friday, April 20th, 2007

ScottGu’s Blog: Update of SQL Server Database Publishing Toolkit for Web Hosting

The SQL Server Hosting Toolkit is a free download that makes it super easy to create a .SQL script file capable of re-creating your database (including the schema, sprocs, and actual data content). When it is installed you can simply right-click on a database inside Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer and walkthrough a wizard to script it out…

Posted in Computers, Programming | No Comments »

Ask a Ninja

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

I had heard about this site some time ago, but it’s still very funny.

http://askaninja.com/

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

c# Dictionaries

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

I recently discovered how to use the Generic Dictionary class in c# to make a dictionary that holds anything. VB6/VBScript dictionaries use the Scripting.Dictionary class which consist of a string key/value pair. There have been many times that I wanted to store an object in the value part. In c#, I wanted them to keep from looping all the items in a list simply to check existance. Ah, .Contains where art though.

The following lines demonstrate.

//Includes
using System.Collections.Generic;

//Declaration/Instanciation
private Dictionary objContacts = new Dictionary( );

//Existance check
if (objContacts.ContainsKey(nIndex))

//Addition
objContacts.Add(nIndex, objContact);

//Removal
objContacts.Remove(nIndex);

//Iteration
foreach (int nIndex in objContacts.Keys)

//Access element by key
Contact myContact = objContacts[nIndex];

O’Reilly
MSDN IDictionary Interface

Posted in Programming, Technology | No Comments »

Photos Uploaded

Monday, April 9th, 2007

There’s not time now to write all the projects and events that I took photos of the past month. Suffice it to say they are all uploaded and should contain the dates that they were taken so the will be in chronological order.

Some of my favorites are the flowers and animals in the yard. Check out this squirrel.

Posted in Events, House, Projects, Site Admin | No Comments »

What a week!

Saturday, April 7th, 2007

Holy crap this was a busy week. I haven’t forgot about the blog by any means. Sometimes the db is down and I can’t post. That’s really annoying. When I have time I’ll probably move hosting companies or do this from one of my computers. I’ve resisted this is the past because I couldn’t trust myself not to fiddle, but I’ve proved that wrong recently.

Anyway it went like this…
Last Friday at work we tried something new to solve a persistent multi-user performance issue between COM and .Net. Basically, cache the problem COM objects. I had been working on a weaker solution for the next version after talking with Tim we decided to put this in the current code and test it. Weekend tests showed this worked well. So on Monday we went to put an improved solution in place. I would be off work from Tue to Wed. I got this done on Monday no problem.

Wed. was my birthday and Mom and Gma were coming on Tue. They showed up about 10:00 am to do whatever. That was their birthday present. Eminently more useful than crap. Not all the existing crap has found a living place in the new house. Grandma talked about painting the master bedroom and that seemed like a good idea. I had washed the walls, but there were tar stains in the corners and the small closet was knock down cigarette smelling. The MB screams out for a repaint more than any other.

It took a while to get going. Showing the house and talking about various aspects. We went to Lowe’s about 12:00 for paint. I realized that I was a day from 32 and I had never chosen the color for my own room. Apartments, dorm rooms, and my home in Canadian were all chosen for me. I was at a complete loss. I was concerned I would pick a color, because it was familiar not because I liked it. Several earlier favorites were also colors in the house or mom’s house. After a while I picked a brown-pink for the walls.

We moved some furniture and threw a plastic over the floors and bed and started painting Kilz. Wow, that stuff is tough to paint. It took from 2:00-5:00 with 3 of us going after the ceiling, closets, moulding, walls, and doors. The we waited an hour. Mom gave a coat of enamel to the closet shelves, Grandma raked, and I sanded wood for the pantry shelving. It is really uncomfortable telling Mom and Grandma what to do and my project list consists of one-person jobs. Grandma identified almost all the plants around the yard. There are tulips, daffidils, onions, garlic, yarrow?, peach or apricot trees, sweet peas, and more I can’t remember. She showed me were to plant the cantalope, watermelon, and pumpkins.

At 6:00 we started the actual painting. Grandma tried one lower panel and it was pink. Not much brown in it. This might work for a girls room, but I can just hear Patience and Jessica; “Red Flag!”. So, we decided to focus exclusively on the closets. This seemed quite reasonable given the time. What an education though. Closests are one of the hardest “rooms”. Two and a half of us worked for 3 and half hours to put down a spotty coats of pink. The blue just kept bleading though again and again. They went home at 9:30. I felt very guilty they stayed till 9:30 and had a 2 hr drive home and we only got the closets done. Grandma felt bad that she left the job unfinished and I could sleep in my bedroom.

Wed. I woke up with a very large unexpected project on my todo list. Though many things are not in thier final resting place or even a good resting place they are waiting on a project. The active list shouldn’t be more than 2 or 3 long. At this time I had unfinished trellis for the hops, replacement shelves for the kitchen pantry and lower cabinets, a bit of touch up design on the large garden bed based on lessons learned in building the second bed, and various little things that jump up and take just 5-5 minutes. The trellis project lacked braces, shelf project lacked a air tank+compressor for blowing off the sawdust, the raised beds lacked dirt, and the others lacked time. Now, I had a room to be painted. This project lacked color selection and somebody to paint.

I made my list of togets (like todos) and went to Lowe’s first. Sucky place to get an air tank unless you want want to mount it on a truck. This came from Harbor Freight who also had a very cheap router and bits. I’m looking for that extra little bit of bang on the wood working projects. We used routers in 4-H and it’s a simple and fast way to add pinache. Wish I had found it before putting up the trellis posts, but oh well. Sometime I know I should wait and just don’t want to. Other times, I know something will solve itself and being proactive is just a waste of time (Water Heater replacement).

The raised bed dirt came from Pete’s greenhouse. 30 bags of mulch and 60 bags of Pete dirt run about $320. That’s 1500 lbs of dirt. Delivery is $15. OMG, yes! That’s on Monday. Yay! I have onions waiting, planning on plant selection and placement, and work on adding the probiotics to brink life and balance to the soil. The place selection and placement is another project buzzing in the back of my head. Something about the wrongness of planting all the same plant all together in rows or grids. It would be better if it looked like a real world environment. Diff plants, diff heights, selected based on their strengths and weaknesses. I’ve heard of this with 2 or 3 plants; basil next to tomatoes for example. But not with 12 or so like I’m thinking/feeling. It may take years to work this one out.

At Lowe’s I got several color papers. If it looked interesting I picked it up. When I got home I made myself pick colors first. That was tough, ’cause I really didn’t want to do it. The risk of another bad decision is high and I make myself feel bad for bad decisions (and nothing happens for good decisions; Gotta love that logic). It really helped when I cut up all the colors and reduced them to one per sheet instead of three. Then sorted the colors. There were about 4 or 5 major categories; light brown, dark brown, dark gray/blue, and light blue. And the ceiling color too. I made my choice on all, set them down, and went to work finishing other projects. The closet shelves got another coat of paint, cleaned the pantry shelf wood and gave it one coat on one side, finished the trellis, and planted the hops. Heather, Kayla, and Grandma called to wish happy birthday. And that was my birthday.

Back to work on Thursday. I’m running a little slow, because my mind has been on completely different things. Tim immediately tells me that the solution from Monday. Great news! This has been a problem since January. We promised a patch for that day with the fixes. I’m also thinking how to put this into the next version. There are at least a couple of improvements it could used immediately and I had made a list of more time consuming ones on Monday. Tim asks if I’m not doing anything else, no. So I get dropped into the EE bug bash, which started 15 minutes ago. EE is a completely different program. It has a piece of Interview, but I haven’t thought about EE or wanted to for a month.

Remember, Tim told me they needed a patch today and it looks like the SW build had problems while I was gone. First things first, SW is behind on testing and has to build. Try to logon to the build server, but no connection. Try another couple of things. Read email. Oh, look there’s a virus outbreak going on today. The Chicago-Amarillo link is closed, we can’t test Oracle bugs, I can’t get to the build servers, and our computers are going to spontaneously reboot this morning after applying a patch. IT is working hard to resolve all issue.

Back to the Bug Bash since I can’t do anything else. Thank God they didn’t close all connections. My EE code is over a month old. We have a strategy meeting. My part’s pretty simple. Only Leo and I know Interview and Interview Designer (ID) intimately. Leo assigns me some ID bugs (you don’t need a full working EE). The day rolls on and I fix all the bugs and break the build once. I contributed a lot more than I thought I could. IT sent and email at 10:30 saying the virus problems would be cleared by mid-day. My computer patches and reboots. More bugs in ID get fixed. Some people really have problems getting anything done without and Oracle connection.

At 10 till 4:00 try the build server. Connecting…Connecting…Conn Connection Made. Yay! The build server is jammed from 4/1. Clear up a couple of things and keep it stopped. Start making the patch. Need code from my computer on build server. Need any updates to PE, including pdbs. PE build server is down. It was infected by the virus. Thank God the SW build server was not. Copy old patch, review SW build and SOS, test SW build. It’s 6:00 the bug bash is over. I contributed 12 points and lost 10 for killing the build. Sucks because it was a stupid thing, only Leo should have been affected, and I had it fixed in 6-8 minutes. But it made everyone think the build was always broke. Yay, bug bash people(on the conference phone). Back to patch.

At 7:00 we go next door for dinner. Rob is treating. He is my boss’s boss and the one who hired me. Dinner till 8:00 with 5 of us. Rob builds PE. It’s still sensitive after its SOS crashed a few weeks ago (the reason testing for SW is behind schedule). Patch ready, waiting on PE files and final build. The patch was waiting since about 5:00. From 5:00-6:00 I was fixing a defect the bug tracker and decided to an a minor enhancement. Really a deficieny that bugged me since I started. Fixed and tested. Link to PE files come in. Up to build server. Building… Copy only relevant files to patch. Check patch, fix patch, check again, fix again, check again. Patch is ready. Send email on patch. Send email on minor enhancement. 9:00 I’m going home. That was Thursday.

Friday, I read the email that says we get off at 1:00. Thank God, several home projects got nothing at all done Thursday. I need a coat of paint on several projects. Still haven’t figured out what to do about the master bedroom painting project. I’m sleeping on the floor on an air mattress. TiVo, cable box, and TV are hooked up. It’s somewhat annoying, because I get the feeling that my angels or spirits are standing or towering over me beside the air mattress. This makes me annoyed at them. It’s not really their fault. Then I start thinking why they can’t be shorter. Where they come from is closer or is absolute and not relative. Size is for physical. Ether sees no such constraint/property.

Uh, anyway it’s Friday and we get off at 1:00 and I’m running behind. Start working on next version of SW. Some defects came in while I was gone and the bitmaps for Installshield are done. It’s too bad, last Friday I had SW down to one defect, which was going to take all of Friday to fix. After work, go home and eat then to Lowe’s for paint. I decided the colors from Wed. look good and if I make a mistake in selection it’s not the worst thing in the world. Tracy said paint a room takes a week. That’s not intolerable. Grandma and mom made me nervous and concious of their time constraint. W/o that I could take as much time as I wanted and just do it. Also, the trellis project was finished, the pantry wood is getting painted, and the air mattress is cold. While at Lowe’s I run into Marlena who is also painting her house. There are 4 colors in all; trim , chair rail, and doors, above chair rail, below chair rail, and ceiling. The ceiling is Anthem White. A light brown on the upper walls, darker brown on the lower walls, and a very light brown on the trim. Actually, the trim test looks white.

I start at 3:00 and go until 9:30. The walls got 2 coats of color 1, 2 coats on the ceiling, color 2 on the pink panel Grandma painted, and a strip on the moulding to test. It’s funny the wet paint reminds me of melted ice cream. The pink in the closet, light cream color and dark brown cream color make me think of a neapolitan. All the colors seem to go well together. Maybe the pink is a shade or two too pink. I really like it; not too male or too female, neutral, soft, clean looking. Soooo much better than the yellow mustard. Even the ceiling had been yellow. And the very dated blue from the closests is gone.

Today, I got up and saw the phone rang several times. Oops, left it in the kitchen. Call Grandma back and Mom answers. Christopher and Staci had their baby this morning at 1:20 AM. So, I went to NWTH and visited with them for a few hours. Came home and wasted some more time then painted again and did a few little projects in the garage. For example, the sheetrock was starting to come off the ceiling.

Tomorrow morning I head to Canadian and Easter. It snowed a little today. And occured to me that white is the only color they don’t make plastic eggs in. So, they will be highly visible. :) Jessica left today. Patience and Adam arrived today. Mom’s already there. I look forward to it. Should be fun.

Posted in House, Programming, Projects, Rambling | No Comments »

Maddison Grace Born

Saturday, April 7th, 2007

Staci had Maddison Grace at ~1:20 AM 4/07/07. These are my pictures from that morning.

Posted in Events | No Comments »